Tag: Jimmy Belasco

We were expecting a letter from the the govt as early as September, and knowing how things can seem to crawl through the system we were surprised when it arrived several days ago, late October. Not too bad… as things can go in “the system”.

This is the letter giving us our interview date. This is the last real hurtle on the journey. This is where they sit us both in an office together with an interviewer and they can ask all sorts of questions to see if we really are a couple. Questions could be specific enough that you might only know the answer to if you are living together.

A couple of our friends who have gone through this said that the questioner was so nervous (because of the same sex thing) that they asked a couple basic things and stamped their papers as quickly as they could…”next!”

Within a few weeks of this interview (if we pass) Mabo will be presented with a GREEN CARD! And two years from now, proving we are still together, he will be given FULL U.S. CITIZENSHIP status.

With his green card, he will no longer be bound to any of his temporary visa restrictions…

Our interview is set for December 01 @ 10:15am! Wish me luck that I don’t forget his favorite cereal or what country he was born in… or something silly like that!

“What are you talking about? You know I don’t operate out of fe…..a……….r”

I couldn’t even finish the word fear before my mind was flooded with fear.

“Omgosh! I am completely afraid of losing everything…”

At first, when my friend asked me that question, I was almost insulted. You see, fear was not a factor for me in the early years of owning my own businesses; and because of this, my response to her question was automatic. For all of the previous 14 years in business I was so used to operating without (much) fear, I didn’t seem to recognize it as it crept into and took over my life… and my business!

How did I not see this happening?

I should know better. I learned how to purposefully manifest in the mid 1990’s and I had been using this knowledge to create some amazing results in both my businesses and my life. And one of the key elements in manifesting purposefully is to recognize and face your fears; but how quickly I forgot.

Fear is a sneaky little devil… and very often your ego is not your best friend.

Basically, unbeknownst to me, my hidden fears were shaping my reality. At that moment I was staring down the fiery throat of my deepest, darkest fears… and they were about to come true!

Since my business was crashing and burning around me, it became impossible to pay myself. I eventually fell several months behind on both my house and car payments. I was in the process of losing my business, that was a reality, and soon to follow would be my car and, heaven forbid, my home. If I lost the house, there would have been no way to keep my entire large family of rescue animals together. These animals have become my children and my love for them is immense – they are my family.

Over the years I have learned a lot about fear (and in this case, I was about to learn more). Fear is basically “False Evidence/Expectations Appearing Real”. It is a perceived idea of something that could happen, and you expect that it might happen, though it has not yet become part of your current reality – thus it is false evidence appearing as real. It is not real because it is not actually a part of your current reality.

At the moment one of your false expectations begins to actually manifest into your life, it is no longer a fear – it has crossed over into your reality. So yes, just as dreams can come true, so also can fears.

One such example of a fear crossing over into my reality was the collapsing of the business beneath my feet. That, my friends, had become a reality. Losing the house and the car were well on their way to happening, but at that moment in time the house and car were still in my possession. Luckily for me the losing of the house and car were still just in the fear stage.

The day when I realized that I was encased in a deep well of my darkest fears, I was very pissed off at myself for letting it happen. That evening, when I went on my walk, I began to call forth my fears.

“OK. What am I afraid of?”

One by one my fears came to me. As one would pop into my head, I would ask what I needed to learn from it, I then thanked it for what it came to teach me and I sent it off. I am not saying these fears magically disappeared, though I was purposefully releasing them from my current thoughts. I do believe that during that walk, some of those fears dissipated into nothing once I began to look at them individually and see that they were simply false evidence. And some of them were deep fears that may always stay somewhere within me, though now much closer to the surface where I could monitor them. I knew that if my fears remained in the dark they would forever rule me. This process of looking at my fears seems to remove much of their power over me.

I knew that as long as they were still in the fear stage and not the reality stage, I had a much better chance.

What I have come to know in my own life experience about my thoughts (my fears or my dreams) – they will only cross over into my reality if I continue to feed them enough expectant energy. And when I say feed them, I simply mean thinking about them, and expending emotion while thinking about them. The more intense the energy with which I think of and expect something to happen, the greater the energy I am feeding this thought into becoming my reality.

As I have in the past with bringing my dreams into reality, I knew that I needed to direct my thoughts, expectations and emotions in the direction I wanted to go… rather than remain focused upon the current mess I was in.

If I do not purposefully give myself a new reality to focus upon, I will not be able to stop my brain from thinking about the fear. So, just as I have written business plans in my past, I began writing down my new reality; and the trick for me was/is to write it in the present moment, as if it is already in my reality. I would then spend as much time imagining this reality and begin feeling it as if it was actually there. Isn’t this exactly what I did, with great passion, to create the businesses and my past successes?

Don’t feed any idea you don’t want to see sitting on top of your plate staring back at you. Feed only the ideas you want to see grow.

I also have learned that this is a process that can take some time. It doesn’t always take a long time, though I am sometimes a slow learner. When you are as deep in the well as I was, it wasn’t as simple as choosing new thoughts, adding instant passion and presto! My passion for the new reality had to build and grow to become greater than the energy that created my current situation. Here in lies the challenge. I was now learning how to manifest in the face of my greatest fears and having to do so during the lowest point in my life – when I didn’t even have the fortitude to turn on my computer. I figured it would be a long haul, though I was determined to keep moving forward to change my current situation. In the months that followed I was able to sell off enough of my personal items to get current on the house and car, and yes, my family stayed together. The entire process of getting myself to the point where I could honestly say “I am living in the most peaceful stage of my life” took approximately 5 years.

The exciting part in all of this is that it was my thoughts, my expectations and my choices that got me into my mess. I use the word exciting because I could also do the same to get me out of my mess. I could choose new thoughtsto create the reality of my choice. And guess who has control over my chosen thoughts? Yep, you guessed it. Me.

So,

if my thoughts create my reality…

and, I have full command to chosen ANY thought…

that puts me in the command seat – my reality is my choice.

This is the power of creating consciously.

What happens when we create unconsciously? (Hint: start at the beginning of this post.)

I’ll explain more in Part 5.

To be continued…

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Like this:

Three years ago I stood on the side of the dance floor at the Round Up Saloon and Dancehall watching a power ranger do the most hysterically funny and energetic line dance I’d ever seen! That was the official night that I first noticed Mabo. Less than two years later we were married. Click here to read OUR LOVE STORY – a true Country & Western Dancehall Romance.

Here we are three years from that fateful night. Mabo pulled the costume out of storage and put it on for the 2014 Halloween Block Party down on Cedar Springs (Dallas, TX). Three years earlier I did not have the opportunity to dance with this power ranger… Last night I had the honor of boot scootin’ with a Power Ranger! Happy as can be!

“Fat?! And you thought you were fat? You wanna see fat?! I’ll show you some fat!”

This was the adult me talking to the me in the pictures of when I was younger. I really wasn’t fat at all, maybe a little pudgy in some of the pictures; and by no means was my body the abhorrent image I remember holding in the mind’s eye of my youth.

It wasn’t always like this. Prior to the H-Bomb being dropped upon my psyche that fateful day in the boys department of Muirhead’s Department Store (see part 1), my earliest memories are of being surrounded by girls and woman at church as they are gawking and pulling at me, pinching my cheeks and going on and on about how cute I was and how beautiful my long white/blonde eyelashes were.

There was so much adulation heaped upon me that when I was 5 years old I cut off my eyelashes thinking it would make them all stop pawing at me. I was wrong; it only fueled them more. You would think that a young boy growing up with all of that positive attention toward his cuteness would build a strong self image and a strong sense of self worth.

What happens to a child when a great portion of his self worth is built upon being cute? And what happens when he then grows out of his cuteness, and instead is labeled something horrible, such as HUSKY? I’ll tell you; I began to judge my body as imperfect, not cute and not lovable. I began to feel unworthy of physical love.

Luckily for me, at a young age I knew I possessed the ability to make people laugh, and that gave me enough confidence to carry me through. But as far as my body was concerned, I felt less than; I felt unworthy.

This sense of physical unworthiness drove me to work hard on my body, trying to make it worthy. Through my teens and into young adulthood I would work out sometimes 6-7 days a week…. and I remained unworthy.

Worthy, in my mind’s eye, was an image of physical perfection; an airbrushed image of the perfect body. I remember staring in the mirror, with disgust, thinking, “How could someone love this body?” The sick part to this is, at one point, I was staring at a body in the mirror that looked like a slightly softer (not as cut) version of Mark Wahlberg’s famous Calvin Klein ad.

Because I could not love my body, I was incapable of allowing someone else to love me or my body. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this physical unworthiness that I held onto for so long was the impetus for the destruction of many of my relationships.

The odder piece of this puzzle is that it took me getting completely out of shape, 50+ lbs fatter than my most fit body, in order to begin loving myself and my body.

It was during the darkest period of my entire life, My Dark Period, as my friends would call it (2008-2011), that I purposefully began the journey to loving myself. The events that lead to this dark period created the space into which I began to heal my life. Though this was THE most painful period of my life, and I hope to never experience anything like it again, I am thankful now that it all occurred as it did.

Because I began to love myself and I did not give up on life… my life is now the most peaceful it has ever been. Because I began to love my body… I am healthier than I have been in decades. And because I began to love my body and I did not give up on love… I met the absolute love of my life.

“Fat?! And you thought you were fat? You wanna see fat?! I’ll show you some fat!”

This was the adult me talking to the me in the pictures of when I was younger. I really wasn’t fat at all, maybe a little pudgy in some of the pictures; and by no means was my body the abhorrent image I remember holding in the mind’s eye of my youth.

It wasn’t always like this. Prior to the H-Bomb being dropped upon my psyche that fateful day in the boys department of Muirhead’s Department Store (see part 1), my earliest memories are of being surrounded by girls and woman at church as they are gawking and pulling at me, pinching my cheeks and going on and on about how cute I was and how beautiful my long white/blonde eyelashes were.

There was so much adulation heaped upon me that when I was 5 years old I cut off my eyelashes thinking it would make them all stop pawing at me. I was wrong; it only fueled them more. You would think that a young boy growing up with all of that positive attention toward his cuteness would build a strong self image and a strong sense of self worth.

What happens to a child when a great portion of his self worth is built upon being cute? And what happens when he then grows out of his cuteness, and instead is labeled something horrible, such as HUSKY? I’ll tell you; I began to judge my body as imperfect, not cute and not lovable. I began to feel unworthy of physical love.

Luckily for me, at a young age I knew I possessed the ability to make people laugh, and that gave me enough confidence to carry me through. But as far as my body was concerned, I felt less than; I felt unworthy.

This sense of physical unworthiness drove me to work hard on my body, trying to make it worthy. Through my teens and into young adulthood I would work out sometimes 6-7 days a week…. and I remained unworthy.

Worthy, in my mind’s eye, was an image of physical perfection; an airbrushed image of the perfect body. I remember staring in the mirror, with disgust, thinking, “How could someone love this body?” The sick part to this is, at one point, I was staring at a body in the mirror that looked like a slightly softer (not as cut) version of Mark Wahlberg’s famous Calvin Klein ad.

Because I could not love my body, I was incapable of allowing someone else to love me or my body. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that this physical unworthiness that I held onto for so long was the impetus for the destruction of many of my relationships.

The odder piece of this puzzle is that it took me getting completely out of shape, 50+ lbs fatter than my most fit body, in order to begin loving myself and my body.

It was during the darkest period of my entire life, My Dark Period, as my friends would call it (2008-2011), that I purposefully began the journey to loving myself. The events that lead to this dark period created the space into which I began to heal my life. Though this was THE most painful period of my life, and I hope to never experience anything like it again, I am thankful now that it all occurred as it did.

Because I began to love myself and I did not give up on life… my life is now the most peaceful it has ever been. Because I began to love my body… I am healthier than I have been in decades. And because I began to love my body and I did not give up on love… I met the absolute love of my life.

Like this:

There I stood sparkly-eyed and jumping for joy (inside my head) with my mom in the Boy’s Clothing department at the opulent Muirhead’s Department Store in DearbornMichigan, looking at rack after beautiful rack of the most spectacular clothing I’d ever seen in person. This clothing looked every bit as exciting as I imagined possible from what I had seen on TV shows, such as The Jim Nabors Hour! And they were mine for the choosing! My dream had finally come true!

Because we were the poor preacher’s kids, the Muirhead’s (members of our church when my dad preached in Dearborn, who owned a very high end department store) invited us to come to their store and pick out 2-3 outfits each before school started. I can still smell the richness of this store… it emanated the scent of wealth.

As I stood there, my mind exploded with images of how great I would look as I strutted down the hallway flashing people the peace sign on my way to my classroom on that first day of school. Every head would turn and gasp in awe of my grooviness! As I stood there contemplating which of these amazing outfits I would first try on, my world came to a screeching halt.

“Excuse me ma’am…”I heard behind me, while in the purple haze of my glory,“… you seem to be in the wrong section…”as I heard the sales woman whisper to my mother in a tone as if she were speaking of a horrible and unthinkable disease.“What?!”I snapped my head around just in time to witness as she paused for a few seconds more to look over her shoulders in either direction, I guess to see if the coast was clear,“Ahem, you see ma’am, this section is forslim boys”as her voice became even softer, and ever so slightly more malicious, as if she knew she was about to drop the H-bomb on a little boys heart,

“… your boy isobviouslyHUSKY.”

As the mushroom cloud was forming above my head, and before I could completely comprehend what exactly just happened, she turned to lead us to the department especially assigned for my “type”. Through the blur of my memory, I remember taking the long walk of shame to the dark, rear corner of the boys department as I was placed in front of the ugliest rack of beige clothing I have ever seen. The letters of the sign hanging over the one, singularly sad rack of clothing, designed especially for me, simply read, for the entire world to see in big fat, chunky bold letters –HUSKY BOYS.

My life was over.

“obviously!?!?”

“HUSKY?!?!”

It was official. In that moment, on that day in the late summer of 1971, at the age of 7, I wasfat…unlovable…andobviouslynot worthy of groovy clothing.

This moment in time wrought the basis for my self image that would follow me for the rest of my life through to adulthood. I grew up thinking I was fat… with varying degrees of non-love for my body.